2014 awards

Red Tentacle

2014 WINNER

GRASSHOPPER JUNGLE
Andrew Smith
Egmont

“In the small town of Ealing, Iowa, Austin and his best friend Robby have accidentally unleashed an unstoppable army. An army of horny, hungry, six-foot-tall praying mantises that only want to do two things. This is the truth. This is history. It’s the end of the world. And nobody knows anything about it.” Read more.

2014 FINALISTS

LAGOON
Nnedi Okorafor
Hodder and Stoughton

“Three strangers, each isolated by his or her own problems: Adaora, the marine biologist. Anthony, the rapper famous throughout Africa. Agu, the troubled soldier. Wandering Bar Beach in Lagos, Nigeria’s legendary mega-city, they’re more alone than they’ve ever been before. But when something like a meteorite plunges into the ocean and a tidal wave overcomes them, these three people will find themselves bound together in ways they could never imagine.” Read more.

THE PERIPHERAL
William Gibson
Viking

“Some time around the year 2020, in a trailer park in the Deep South, a young woman witnesses a murder. She is in a video game, and watches with horror as a drone strike kills a child. At precisely the same moment, one hundred years in the future, a boy is remotely killed on the streets of London’s great skyscrapers. The perpetrator remains anonymous. Interweaving two strange futures, from a ramshackle community of US army veterans, to the teeming masses of a mega city, The Peripheral tells the story of a brave new world of drones, outsourcing and kleptocracy, and of a crime that can only be solved across time.” Read more.

THE WAY INN
Will Wiles
Fourth Estate

“The Way Inn is a global chain of identikit mid-budget hotels, and Neil Double is a valued member of its loyalty scheme. Neil is a professional conference-goer, a man who will attend trade fairs, expos and conventions so you don’t have to. This life of anonymised, budget travel would be hell for most, but it’s a kind of paradise for Neil, who has turned his incognito professional life into a toxic personal philosophy. But Neil is about to change.” Read more.

THE RACE
Nina Allan
NewCon Press

“Set in a future Great Britain scarred by fracking and ecological collapse, The Race is the story of four damaged people whose lives are inextricably linked. This is a novel of tender nuances, brutality, insight and great ambition, a narrative that lays bare the fears and joys of being human, and, ultimately, offers hope to us all.” Read more.

Golden Tentacle (Debut)

2014 WINNER

VIPER WINE
Hermione Eyre
Jonathan Cape

“At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice. Based on real events,Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.” Read more.

2014 FINALISTS

THE GIRL IN THE ROAD
Monica Byrne
Blackfriars

“One day Meena gets out of bed covered in blood, with mysterious snakebites on her chest. Her worst fears have been realised: someone is after her and she must flee India at once. As she plots her escape, she learns of The Trail, an energy-harvesting bridge spanning the Arabian Sea that has become a refuge for itinerant vagabonds and loners on the run. This is her salvation.” Read more.

MEMORY OF WATER
Emma Itäranta
Voyager

“Global warming has changed the world’s geography and its politics. Wars are waged over water, and China rules Europe, including the Scandinavian Union, which is occupied by the power state of New Qian. In this far north place, seventeen-year-old Noria Kaitio is learning to become a tea master like her father, a position that holds great responsibility and great secrets. Tea masters alone know the location of hidden water sources, including the natural spring that Noria’s father tends, which once provided water for her whole village.” Read more.

THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL, ANGRY PLANET
Becky Chambers
Self-Published

“Somewhere within our crowded sky, a crew of wormhole builders hops from planet to planet, on their way to the job of a lifetime. To the galaxy at large, humanity is a minor species, and one patched-up construction vessel is a mere speck on the starchart. This is an everyday sort of ship, just trying to get from here to there.” Read more.

THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES
Hanya Yanagihara
Atlantic Books

“In 1950, a young doctor called Norton Perina signs on with the anthropologist Paul Tallent for an expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu’ivu in search of a rumoured lost tribe. They succeed, finding not only that tribe but also a group of forest dwellers they dub ‘The Dreamers’, who turn out to be fantastically long-lived but progressively more senile. Perina suspects the source of their longevity is a hard-to-find turtle; unable to resist the possibility of eternal life, he kills one and smuggles some meat back to the States.” Read more.

Inky Tentacle (Cover Art)

2014 WINNER

Tigerman
Cover by Glenn O’Neill
Written by Nick Harkaway
William Heinemann

“The island of Mancreu is the ideal place for Lester to serve out his time. It’s a former British colony in legal limbo, soon to be destroyed because of its very special version of toxic pollution – a down-at-heel, mildly larcenous backwater. Of course, that also makes Mancreu perfect for shady business, hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in the bay: listening stations, offshore hospitals, money laundering operations, drug factories and deniable torture centres.” Read more.

2014 FINALISTS

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste
Design by Steve Marking
Lettering by Kimberly Glyder
Written by Valerie Martin
Weidenfeld and Nicholson

“A ghost ship appears in the mist. To the struggling author Arthur Conan Doyle, it is an inspiration. To Violet Petra, the gifted American psychic, it is a cruel reminder. To the death-obsessed Victorian public, it is a fascinating distraction. And to one family, tied to the sea for generations, it is a tragedy.” Read more

A Man Lies Dreaming
Cover by Ben Summers
Written by Lavie Tidhar
Hodder and Stoughton

“Deep in the heart of history’s most infamous concentration camp, a man lies dreaming. His name is Shomer, and before the war he was a pulp fiction author. Now, to escape the brutal reality of life in Auschwitz, Shomer spends his nights imagining another world – a world where a disgraced former dictator now known only as Wolf ekes out a miserable existence as a low-rent PI in London’s grimiest streets.” Read more.

Through the Woods
Emily Carroll and Sonja Chaghatzbanian
Written by Emily Caroll
Faber and Faber

“Five mysterious, spine-tingling stories follow journeys into (and out of?) the eerie abyss. These chilling tales spring from the macabre imagination of acclaimed and award-winning comic creator Emily Carroll. Come take a walk in the woods and see what awaits you there…” Read more.

The Book of Strange New Things
Cover by Rafaela Romaya and Yehring Tong
Written by Michel Faber
Canongate

“The Book of Strange New Things is a wildly original tale of adventure, faith and the ties that might hold two people together when they are worlds apart.” Read more.

Invisible Tentacle (Natively Digital Fiction)

2014 WINNER

KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO, ACT III
Cardboard Computer

Kentucky Route Zero is a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway in the caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it. Gameplay is inspired by point-and-click adventure games, but focused on characterization, atmosphere and storytelling rather than clever puzzles or challenges of skill. Read more.

Echovirus12 is a collaborative Twitter fiction page, run by a limited number of writers. Each new tweet echoes in some way the previous tweet or tweets through the use of shared imagery, words, themes, characters, etc. This creates a flow of self-contained microfictions that nevertheless share and pass on elements. Read more.

80 DAYS
Inkle Studios and Meg Jayanth

Phileas Fogg has wagered he can circumnavigate the globe. Hundreds of journeys, thousands of routes. Travel by steamer, express train, airship, hover-car, hydrofoil, gyrocopter, camel, horse-back, hot-air balloon… Can you make it in 80 Days? Read more.

SAILOR’S DREAM
Simogo

A peaceful narrative experience, in which the only objective is to satisfy your curiosity. Explore an ocean dream world, in which time passes even when you are not there, visit forgotten islands and piece together memories – some even existing beyond the screen of your device. Read more.